


in the woods which stutter and sing

by madamebadger



Series: I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence [3]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, F/F, Feel-good, Fluff, Lazy Mornings, Rain, Reading Aloud, Swords and Shields
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-23
Updated: 2015-07-23
Packaged: 2018-04-10 20:32:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4406489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madamebadger/pseuds/madamebadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A rainy day is a good reason for Cassandra to stay in bed a bit rather than do her usual crack-of-dawn training. Josephine is an even better reason.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in the woods which stutter and sing

**Author's Note:**

> This is absolutely nothing but pure, shameless fluff.

It rains.

In Skyhold sometimes the presence of rain itself is a blessing: rain, after all, is not snow, and so the rains of spring say: the cold has abated, we can now have some softness. The rains of spring say: germinate and grow and be welcome, the frost will not kill you. Cassandra lies on her back, arms behind her head, Josephine still asleep curled against her side, and listens to the soft music of the rain on the shutters. 

Normally by this hour she would be up and dressing–quietly, in an attempt (a rarely-successful attempt, but still, an attempt) to not wake Josephine–and preparing to begin her day, with stretching and calisthenics before breakfast, sometimes joined by Cullen, or Blackwall, or Krem, and sometimes alone.

She is not, however, getting up.

There are good reasons for this, she tells herself. There are excellent reasons. When it rains, the training yard becomes first slick with water and then sticky with churned mud. Her gear, once wet, takes forever to dry. She could train in the forge while the hour is still early and the blacksmith and his apprentices have not yet gone to work… but there is not much room in the forge; she is ever at risk of kicking over a bench or an armor form.

Cassandra is bad at deception, even including self-deception. The true reason is the woman whose head currently rests on her shoulder, whose chemise has ridden up almost to her hip because she has tangled one leg over Cassandra’s. And the other reason–a direct descendant of the first reason–is the warm, sleepy lassitude that has invaded Cassandra’s limbs.

Cassandra is not, generally, a lazy person. But as she watches the hairline stripe of light visible between the closed shutters lighten from predawn slate to dawn silver, she does not get up.

After a little while–Cassandra can’t say how long–Josephine yawns and shifts, and then lifts her head. (With the shutters barred and the candles snuffed, the only light in the room comes from the banked fire, just enough to barely outline her tousled corona of hair, the curve of her hip as she pushes the blankets down with one foot.) “It’s raining,” she says, with real delight.

“Yes.” And then, although Josephine has not asked, she says, “That’s why I have not yet gone out.”

She feels Josephine lean close to kiss her, a little clumsily in the dark. “Good,” she says.

Josephine slips away from Cassandra’s side and off the bed (Cassandra thinks a protest, but does not voice it) and goes to the windows with their heavy shutters. 

(Months ago, when the House of Repose was still a threat, Cassandra had protested those windows. Until the threat was gone, if Josephine was going to forbid Leliana from taking more direct action, then at least she should change to a safer room with no windows, or perhaps with arrow slits. Josephine had refused, calmly but firmly. “I am three floors up, the shutters are solid oak and I always bar them at night, and I will not live like a prisoner,” she had said. Cassandra still thought she had been right, but at least now, the point was moot.)

Now, Josephine opens the shutters and leans out the window, arms folded on the deep stone sill. She draws a deep breath of the fresh rain-smell.

“You will let the cold in,” Cassandra said, mildly, “and then complain about it.”

Josephine turns, nose wrinkling at her, and then laughs. “Just for a moment,” she says, over her shoulder. In the morning light, still soft with sleep and in her lace-trimmed chemise, her loosed hair bejeweled with mist and tumbling down her back, she looks astonishingly beautiful and also so young that Cassandra’s heart aches.

(On that topic she and Leliana agree and Josephine vehemently disagrees, claims that ten years are not so much at their ages. It is not exactly youth, though, not exactly. There is something about her that is–not innocent, not naive, but… not weathered, not crushed. It is, Cassandra suspects, that that she has felt grief and regret but she has not had her heart broken, not in the way that destroys you and then raises you back up harder. Leliana and Cassandra, veterans of heartbreak, form a private alliance of two to ensures that it stays that way.)

What Cassandra says is, “Come back to bed.”

Josephine smiles, again, and does; she pauses on her way to take two candles from the desk and put them beside the candle on her bedside, and then light all three. The golden glow they cast over the room is different than the cold silver light of a rainy morning, but no less beautiful, turning Josephine’s skin rosy with warmth.

“I like the way the air smells when it rains,” Josephine says. “I miss it all winter when it’s so dry and it’s just the snow hissing on the roof. Besides, you will keep me warm.”

Cassandra gives an exasperated sigh, but it is all pretense–and furthermore, Josephine knows it. All winter Josephine has stolen Cassandra’s shirts, tucked cold feet between Cassandra’s calves (making her yelp in a truly undignified way), and fitted herself against Cassandra as if she wishes no space between them at all. Cassandra is grateful for it; she treasures those moments–Josephine sitting up against the headboard with Cassandra’s shirt slipping down her narrower shoulders; Josephine curled against her with the blankets tucked around them both–but is not good at asking for them, can never find the words for what she wants when what she wants is something so delicate, so private. To receive it without asking is a gift.

“Why do you suppose it’s raining?” Josephine asks, once she has settled herself back under the blankets, against Cassandra’s side. Cassandra rolls over onto her own side to fold Josephine closer, the softness of her body luxurious against Cassandra’s leaner form. Josephine’s hair tickles Cassandra’s nose, unbrushed and curling like a live thing. Her fingertips stroke along Cassandra’s ribs, not so much seductively as comfortably.

The question confuses Cassandra. “Why does it rain anywhere?”

“No, what I mean is–there is snow on peaks very near here, permanent snow. And yet here it rains. Here, and the forest to the northwest, and the meadows to the southwest, the weather is as if we were many miles down the mountain.” Cassandra shrugs. She cares about ice and snow, rain and sun for what it will mean for travel. “Perhaps it is magic,” Josephine adds playfully.

“Far more useful magic than most, if so,” Cassandra says.

“Perhaps I should ask Dagna,” Josephine says, and Cassandra snorts. (She and Leliana share an opinion about Dagna, that she is useful but dangerous and bears careful watching. Josephine, for some reason, seems rather charmed by her.)

“So long as the pair of you don’t cause Skyhold to fall apart, or explode, or turn into a flock of geese,” Cassandra says, and Josephine laughs.

“Well, I cannot say I mind it. It would be much more unpleasant if it _were_ as cold as the other peaks here.”

Cassandra nods absently, sliding her hand down between Josephine’s shoulders, over the smooth curve of her spine, the rounded softness of her hips. Even through the cloth of her chemise she is warm; being near her like this makes Cassandra think of the pleasure of sinking into a hot bath at the end of a long journey. Josephine lifts her head to kiss her, gentle and undemanding.

After a little while, during which they kiss soft and slow and without expectation, Cassandra says, “Speaking of warmth, I suppose I should get up and build up the fire, make some tea.” She is already contemplating whether, in addition to skipping her morning exercises, she can coax Josephine into staying in for breakfast as well. Perhaps longer, if the day is not busy, and if she can be sufficiently persuasive.

(She does not think of herself as especially persuasive, except at the point of a sword, and yet Josephine–who normally is quite immune to even the fanciest words–seems surprisingly capable of being persuaded by her.)

“Hmm,” Josephine says, but lets go of her. “Shall I read to you, while you do?”

 _That_ is one of Cassandra’s favorite guilty pleasures: poetry–or sometimes, secretly, her terrible novels–read aloud to her, in Josephine’s lilting voice. One of the things that Josephine’s extensive and far-reaching education taught her was elocution. She makes even the most dreadful words on the page seem to dance, and when the words are genuinely good, she makes them soar.

“Yes, please,” Cassandra says.

Josephine takes a moment to choose a book, and Cassandra, kneeling by now on the cold hearth and feeding it the smallest twigs from the kindling box to reawaken it, does not see what she ultimately chooses. There is the sound of pages flipping and then Josephine begins to read.

It is a scene from _Swords and Shields_ , one of Cassandra’s favorites, from the third chapter. She has read it so many times that she could very nearly recite it along with Josephine, and yet in Josephine’s voice it always seems as fresh and new as this rainy morning. 

It is the scene in which the Knight-Captain is riding desperately across the countryside to rescue her beloved, who is being held prisoner by Tevinter slavers in a remote cave, as a means of blackmailing her into canceling her investigation of their slaving ring. The details of horseback riding are all wrong, the details of her armor are all wrong, nobody rides a horse that far and that hard if they expect the horse not to fall over dead (and the Knight-Captain is immensely fond of her horse, which has the improbable name of Dawn-Flower; any soldier or guardswoman or knight [it is also oddly obscure which, exactly, the Knight-Captain is] who named their horse Dawn-Flower would get laughed out of camp). 

And yet despite being wrong on almost every level the scene feels utterly true, in the Knight-Captain’s feelings, her love and fear and fury, and Cassandra can just see her on her palomino mare, her red hair flying in the wind, her face a picture of stalwart determination. Cassandra can feel the anger and terror and devastating adoration that is tearing her to bits as her horse flies across the countryside. And Josephine’s voice turns even the clunkier passages of prose into song, and as she builds the fire from ashy coals to a golden blaze, Cassandra feels them resonate within her like plucked harpstrings.

It ought to embarrass her, but somehow, in this room with the rain a gentle dance on the shutters and the air soft and heavy, it doesn’t.

By the time the coals have begun to thread sun-bright little flames in response to her careful feeding, the Knight-Captain has arrived at the cave and dueled with the two villains at the entrance. (What happens to poor Dawn-Flower is left as an exercise for the reader, although Cassandra knows that the mare will reappear in four scenes and so is not too worried.) By the time the larger sticks have caught alight into merry reds and golds, the Knight-Captain has fought her way to the room where her beloved has been chained up, and freed him. By the time the larger logs have caught and Cassandra has located the iron kettle and its trivet and set them to boiling water for tea, the Knight-Captain and her love have fought their way to the lair of the head slaver. By the time she has found the teapot (which turns out to be full of old tea leaves from yesterday, which she dumps out with a little displeased grunt) the Knight-Captain and her beloved guardsman have defeated the slaver. By the time she has found that particular tea that Josephine loves, the golden one with faint hints of vanilla, they have freed the slaves.

She worries, throughout, that Josephine will wear out her voice–will wear out her voice so early, when Josephine must talk and talk all day. Her head knows that Josephine does not mind talking–takes joy in it, even–and yet her heart finds that hard to believe. And certainly even if Josephine enjoys talking it will not be pleasurable for her if her throat aches. 

And yet she cannot bring herself to stop the fluttering rhythm of the pages, the music of her voice.

She pours the tea, but it is still boiling hot, and that is her excuse for putting both mugs on the bedside table and stretching out on the bed with her head in Josephine’s lap, the blankets dragged up slantwise over her bare legs. Josephine holds the book in one hand (it is lightweight in more ways than one) and strokes Cassandra’s hair with the other as she reads on, a soft touch with the scrape of her pen calluses a welcome counterpoint to the velvety tips of her fingers. The touch lulls her, her eyes dropping as if she is drugged (and perhaps she is) on the tenderness of Josephine’s touch, the lilt of Josephine’s voice, and the soft rhythm of the rain on the shutters and the crackling fire.

Josephine reads the part about the Knight-Captain sending the freed slaves to the safehouse in the city (and _that_ , unlike the horsemanship and the swordplay, is utterly believable, in a way that makes Cassandra think that Varric was most likely writing from life). The scene ends and there is a pause, soft and heavy as delight, and then Josephine turns the page and reads on.

(Cassandra knows what the next scene is. Cassandra knows the next scene, if anything, better than the one that came before it, for all that she would be embarrassed to the point of violence to admit it.

Cassandra knows what the next scene is, and the heat rushes to her face, for all that she is currently half-naked with her head in her lover’s lap.)

Josephine reads on, as the Knight-Captain and her lover find a conveniently comfortable alcove in the caves (there are _never_ conveniently comfortable alcoves in caves, and yet Cassandra wants nothing more than to believe that they can somehow mysteriously find one) and begin to kiss, and more than kiss, and–

“Are you trying to seduce me by way of reading?” Cassandra asks, and her voice is huskier than she expected.

Josephine lowers the book. There is a curve to her full lips that is both sweet and wicked. “Is it working?”

“You know it is,” Cassandra says, and takes the book from Josephine’s hands and pulls her down for a kiss.

Josephine’s lips are full and warm as honey, and the soft gasp she makes when Cassandra tumbles her over on top of her is bright as dawn, and her laughter as Cassandra presses kisses across her throat and shoulder is light as the flight of birds, and any other terrible metaphors will have to be left to Varric’s books, because they are both done with words, falling softly into the eloquent language of touch.

The tea, in the end, has to be reheated.

**Author's Note:**

> In addition to absolutely shameless rainy-day Pentilyet fluff, and fires, and tea, and reading aloud, I had to put in some Varric-is-an-awful-author-but-gets-emotions-precisely-right. 
> 
> Also I absolutely believe that circa Act 3 of Dragon Age 2, Fenris and Merrill create a safehouse for escaped slaves, and Varric helps, and nobody can convince me otherwise.
> 
> Title is from e e cummings’ [i have found what you are like](https://jaclynhi.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/i-have-found-what-you-are-like-by-e-e-cummings/).


End file.
